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Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#791

The same forces that enable high tech salaries, also make layoffs more likely. - The market for talent is competitive. So companies bid up to the absolute max they can - The market for managers is also competitive. Creating dynamics that lead to larger teams and raises for team members - Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done The end r…

> weird how people feel so differently when they get fired

It's weird that the average person working these jobs has bills to pay, and perhaps additional family members to care for?

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A somewhat sensible take, but the issue isn’t just healthcare. A lot of your life is based off of long-term, fixed cost cash flow. E.g. you can’t pay less on your mortgage just because you got fired. Even with savings, getting laid off is highly disruptive, and, if done as part of a broader downturn in the market, you may never recover the required cash flow to enable your lifestyle.

This why we need the tiny home movement combined with progressive property taxes - 0 prop tax bracket for lowest 20% property values If you have mortgage then you don’t really own your house.

Tiny homes are great! Provided you have no family, and no hobbies.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those employees were costing more than the value they were creating. If the marginal product of labor is lower than the marginal cost of labor, the company should reduce headcount. If higher, the company should increase headcount.

Arguably the value they were creating was influenced by the direction and application that labor was directed at. Redirecting that available labor at something more valuable would fix that as well wouldn't it?

Yes, if there is something more valuable to redirect the labor to and my intuition is that there is not, I mean not in the Dropbox business.

2640 employees seems like a ridiculous number for a company like Dropbox. I work at a company that's about half of that and you wouldn't believe how many different services this company runs and I still think there's a lot of inefficiency.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised what lifestyle creep does to people. Often people don't pay off their debts and instead scale their debts to their new income - it's stupid I know. I agree they should be in a better position because of their income, and I'd say more than an average amount are. But there are still a lot of people in that bracket who absolutely would have the floor pulled out from under them. People are often caught…

Depending on the resale value of what the debt is for (homes mainly) maintaining your leverage ratio can work out great for you. Mortgages are the only way most people are able to invest with leverage and the source of a lot of generational wealth.

You should only leverage what you are OK with losing entirely. Most people should not be leveraging their only home as investments. We are heading into some rough times and people will find out about that.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who sets the standards? Their CEO-buddies on the boards. None of them would dare rock the boat. One of the failure modes of 401ks and investment funds are large investment pools that don't vote at AGMs, leaving boards largely dominated by CxOs, to their own devices.

Either you dont understand my point, or I dont understand yours. Im saying CEOs have financial skin in the game tied to company performance. They get less, often much less when the company shits the bed. This was in response to a parent post that seems to think CEO comp is entirely isolated from performance.

You probably didn't understand my point. You said CEOs are paid that way because it's the standard. In your opinion, who sets the standards for CEO compensation, and what are their day-jobs? The majority of boardmembers happen to be C-suite executives themselves.

My thesis is that the boards of public companies have been captured by the executives, and the diffuse shareholding has been ineffective in providing oversight to the boards at AGMs. If SWE (or teacher) remuneration were determined by a (nominally independent) subcommittee dominated by other SWEs (or teachers), I posit that incomes for that role would outstrip other roles at the same organization over multiple decades, due to biases and knowing who butters their bread. It would become standard practice, naturally.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#796
post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kind of ignores the core asymmetry of capitalism, that those with the capital are the ones with the power. Nobody can do a background check on a company to see who they laid off or fired before they work there.

What do you mean? Information about previous layoffs is all over the news, social media, and dedicated sites like Glassdoor. Only a fool or someone really desperate would take a job without doing a thorough background check on the company first. And while I sympathize with workers who have to take whatever job they can get, that doesn't apply to most HN users.

Glassdoor itself encourages users not to post anything factual, only opinion-based, because of the legal consequences [1]. Glassdoor is more like a Google business review than a background check anyway.

Also your estimation of HN users is probably out of date with the current state of the employment market.

[1] https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/Tips-on-writing-a-revie...

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how would you like the next CEO to handle it, for reference?

Stop saying "take responsibility" if they aren't actually. If you knock a girl up and you "take responsibility" it means you getting married. If you are in a car wreck and you "take responsibility" it means you are paying for repairs. If you commit a crime and "take responsibility" you are going to jail. So if a CEO is "taking responsibility" it should be something like that second case, dollars from their own pocket…

CEOs are responsible to the board of directors and shareholders. The BoD and shareholders are who choose and remove CEOs and you can bet both are considerably displeased when the company isn't as profitable as they expect.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#798
post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired. When you leave, your manager loses 1/N of team productivity. When you get fired, you lose 100% of your income. I bet the manager would be more upset if the entire team quit. But even then, they'd still have their job—for a while, at least.

Eventually we all get fired. It shouldn't come as a shock. This is why people working in volatile industries subject to boom/bust cycles should live below their means and keep at least several months of living expenses (including health insurance premiums) in low-risk, liquid investments. I do understand that it can be challenging to save for young people with student debt starting out in a HCOL area. But I see older…

> Eventually ...

Yes, but the problems start in severe economic crises. Specifically, when those several months turn into years.

Many filters during the hiring process, prior to interview will discard those candidates who have gaps since last employment regardless of circumstance. They may use AI as a third-party company to review and obscure the fact that they aren't hiring anyone over 40, female, or otherwise protected classes but that is what is happening regularly, along with other elements such as degrees being weighted higher than experience algorithmically.

> I do understand ...

I can tell you from personal experience, this opinion of yours isn't reflective of the whole. I've been in Tech for a decade, I was unlucky and was laid off before the major lay offs (2022) as I was involved in workforce reduction for a buyout merger. I've been looking ever since, and I've had to find work elsewhere in the interim once my reserves were expended.

I was extremely frugal, cooking everything myself, nothing luxurious. Inflation destroyed my reserves, the lack of jobs forced me to look wider than my given profession since there are no jobs, and I had more saved than most (>50k in liquid reserves at the start).

This isn't some recession like before. This is a great depression, potentially a big debt crises like Germany pre-WW2.

70% of my professional network in IT/Tech right now, across the board, is out of work. I'll let that sink in. 70%.

We are at peak hiring for seasonal hiring and unemployment is 7.0% in August? Hiring freezes guarantee this will be double digits by the annual count. National unemployment is 1.5%. That's a 4.6x national distortion between the national average unemployment and one sector that impacts everything else as a labor multiplier, and that measurement only counts those currently getting unemployment, any long-term displacement outside 18 weeks isn't counted.

Its looking more like we're in the middle of an economic collapse, which makes sense if you know about ponzi's, economics of boom-bust cycles, and how we are entering a bust cycle related to the petrodollar agreement abandonment (by the Saudi's); all those dollars printed for abroad use are now flowing back to compete with the same goods despite high interest rates.

BRICS largely isn't about attacking the US economically, its about sheltering from the global economic fallout of fiat money printing, for more than half a century. The bankers are and have been doing this to us since before we were born, and this happens every time large fractions of global assets get concentrated into few hands. Its cyclical. Large market-share companies are funded by preferential loans made by those same bankers. This is how you sieve wealth and marketshare, then drive prices up, and eventually end in deflation or hyper-inflationary collapse, because unlike normal systems economics is both sticky psychologically, and mathematically chaotic (3-body-problem).

There is no beautiful deleveraging, the bill always comes due. If this worsens, and I don't see how it cannot, this will be known by the survivors as the folly of one big generation.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#799
post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually we all get fired. It shouldn't come as a shock. This is why people working in volatile industries subject to boom/bust cycles should live below their means and keep at least several months of living expenses (including health insurance premiums) in low-risk, liquid investments. I do understand that it can be challenging to save for young people with student debt starting out in a HCOL area. But I see older…

> Eventually ... Yes, but the problems start in severe economic crises. Specifically, when those several months turn into years. Many filters during the hiring process, prior to interview will discard those candidates who have gaps since last employment regardless of circumstance. They may use AI as a third-party company to review and obscure the fact that they aren't hiring anyone over 40, female, or otherwise prote…

> This is a great depression

No, it's not even close. Unemployment in 1933 was 25%.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired. Really? You think its weird that someone leaving impacts that person more than their manager, team, or company? A manager doesn't care that you leave because he still gets to bring home a salary, all they have to do is hire another person and maybe cut back on scope for a little while. When someone is layed…

> People often have long term financial commitments they cannot back out of, and not knowing how you'll make rent, if you can afford your child's school fees, or even maybe having to cut back on how much you eat, _is stressful_ and emotionally taxing. I'm sure people making >200k/year and getting a 4 month severance package will be cutting back on how much they eat. What you say is true about low or even medium incom…

You would think so but it's often the opposite. The poorer you are the more conscious you have to be about money management so getting laid off may just be yet another obstacle life has thrown at you, business as usual.

Meanwhile if you've lived an easy life you may not have learned how to cope when the hard times come.

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